Linux Distributions for the noob-nix

[Mokmo418]

So what are the good Linux distributions around ?
I hear about Mandrake, Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Knoppix and i can't really set my sights on a particular one. I see these bricks at bookstores that sell the distribution with plenty of instructions. Are these worth it ? There are soooo many to choose from! Just pour in your suggestion. I'm going to get plenty of time to tweak on my computer right after this holiday season (between semesters) so i think this would be nice.
It's going to be run on the spankin' new rig in my signature

 

[uOpt]

The question is more complex than you think, because even if you narrow it down to new users, there are different things that new users expect.

For example, Fedora Core 2 and 3 are extremely agressive when it comes to push in the newest software while Mandrake is much more conservative.

But what is more helpful for the user? FC will have better, or even much better, desktop components, and support more hardware out of the box. But you might come up with something that doesn't work and needs fiddling. For example, their startup scripts drive me crazy by often initializing things in the wrong order, which depending on what hardware you have and what you do might be a problem for you or you might never notice it.

You understand what I mean? There is great and fast progress made in the end user components of Linux and having the latest can be a real help. This is what FC gives you. Some people accept a little fiddling if they get better guidance with the software afterwards. Some hate fiddling and rather waste their time with suboptimal desktop components later.

My personal recommendation is to download FC2 (didn't really test FC3 yet), run up2date to get all the updates and see whether it works for you. If so, then great you have the latest comfort items. If it doesn't and you find yourself in front of problems that you cannot fix or don't want to bother with, then buy the Mandrake package.

 

[drag]

I've installed Fedora Core 3 and it's realy quite nice. Worth the upgrade, IMO.
After installing it check out dag's rpm

Thats the first thing you should do if you want to try out Fedora. Head down onto his instructions page.

My first distribution I used was from a bookstore, I bought a linux book and it had some install cdroms inside of it. Redhat 7.0. Absolutely dreadfull operating system, but a lot better then what I had at the time. (win98 first edition). Since then Redhat/Fedora are a lot better.

But any distro is great, just make sure that you always get the newest version you can find. Watch out for partially supported hardware like Nforce motherboards and ATI cards, these can cause headaches. On a well supported computer, though, installation is a breeze.

Most people end up using a few different distros until they find one they realy like.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Debian, Slackware, Gentoo if you want some work.
Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE if you don't.
RedHat if you want to pay.

TRY THEM ALL

 

[Leohart]

I am a total noob when it comes to Linux. Yet, I have tried some distro. I tried FC1,2,3 and SuSE. I love SuSE, It is as easy as Windows although you might need to go around for several minutes to find out how to find more rpms and stuff.

On the whole, SuSE is very stable and easy to use. Novell also distributes free DVDs from time to time. I got one 3-pack DVD that has SuSE Pro 9.1 on it. Worth the waiting. It is really good since the DVD eliminate the swapping discs work when come to installing extra stuff.

If you are like me, give SuSE a try. They have just had a new version SuSE 9.2 which can be run on LiveCD or LiveDVD. Whatever you chose for the dvd or cd, make sure you have at least 256MB RAM otherwise it would not run.

Nux -> Noob Users eXtinct.

 

[EmperorRob]

With all the good reviews it's gotten just around here I'd say try Ubuntu.

 

[Stiganator]

Gentoo!!! I learned so much more from building everything, and the online manual rocks. FC2 is easiest IMHO. Plus you get bragging rights by optimizing every piece of code. jk guys

 

[Abix]

Originally posted by: Stiganator
Gentoo!!! I learned so much more from building everything, and the online manual rocks. FC2 is easiest IMHO. Plus you get bragging rights by optimizing every piece of code. jk guys

Agreeage.

I was a more or less total *nix noob, but after a week and a half with Gentoo....Ive setup and taken down a Gentoo install three times, compiled my own kernel more times than I care to count, learned the awesomeness of Gentoo, and become enough of a Gentoo user to actually operate it sufficientlly.

PS - What I love about *nix is that if you break something, you can fix it. You dont gotta reinstall when something crashes either. If you so desire, you can track down the bug, and fix it yourself

 

[Nothinman]

I learned so much more from building everything

Yea, because watching all that scrolling gcc output is oh-so informative.

 

[Basie]

Ah, the enthusiasm of youth. Full of Zeal and Fervor. I still like the look of Xandros since I'm still into WinXP very Heavily. I don't see all the hoopla for Ubuntu. It's Ok. Aurox is cool and so is Yoper.

 

[calyco]

I like Fedora 3 over Mandrake.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't see all the hoopla for Ubuntu.

It's the ease of Debian with a nice installer and well designed Gnome desktop, it's what a lot of people have been waiting for, for quite some time. And it's maintained by Debian developers so the quality of the pakages and interoperability with stock Debian should remain solid.

 

[Dewey]

I recently installed Suse 9.2. I am very impressed. I'm normally a Windows user, but I have installed various flavors on Linux over the years. This 9.2 is slick and I prefer it to Windows. It seems to have all the OS features one would need. The only question is if you are tied to some Windows app.
The variety of Linux distros is frustrating. Each one seems to organize the files differently.

 

[Nothinman]

The variety of Linux distros is frustrating. Each one seems to organize the files differently.

The variety of people in the world is frustrating. Each person seems to have different opinions and wants to do things differently.

No offense meant Dewey, but different people like different things and the openness of Linux (and technically the BSDs, but noone seems to take advantage of it there) gives anyone the power to setup a distribution exactly how they like it. Sure it can be confusing at first, but it's a small price to pay for all of the freedom and choice surrounding it. And it's not like you can't download and try just about every distro for free to see which one you like.

 

[trmiv]

I think you'd like Ubuntu. I'm somewhat linux-newbish (used Mandrake and Redhat in the past, compiled a kernel once or twice, that's about it). I was looking to get back into trying linux out, and looking for a distro. I tried Debian, but was a little intimidated by it. So I switched to Ubuntu. I liked it, but wanted to try more. So I tried Fedora Core, which was nice. But, I could never quite get YUM working that great, and heard great things about Debian based distros with apt-get. So I went back to Ubuntu, and I think I'll stick with it. I've updated and downloaded a few things with apt-get, and it works great! Now I'm just trying to get rid of the ugly ass brown theming Ubuntu comes with by default, and making it more to my liking.

I was going to try Suse 9.2, but I couldn't find the install (not the live) version for free.

 

[drag]

I've been using Fedora Core 3 alot once I got it installed on my laptop.

The whole thing is very slick and dead stable. It uses LVM (large volume management) and SELinux (using simplier set of access rules then is normally used) by default.

For desktop usage I installed the "Workstation" level install and as soon as that was setup I went and downloaded and installed the rpm's from dag's RPMs (read thru the instructions and don't forget to download and import his public gpg key).

That setup apt with his and a few other people's repositories that they work very hard to keep consistant with one another. (not using the Fedora.us or Fedora "Extras" that don't work on compatability with others, apparently)

And that will give you the ability to install packages like VLC that can play mp3's and dvd's (although I use Xine for that), which Fedora aviods due to licensing entanglements. Also you can use it to install the synaptic GUI front end.

Of course the nicest thing so far for it is the Gnome 2.8 desktop. The way Fedora has it setup is pretty slick.

One thing that had me a bit disturbed was how Linux-freindly the Helix/Realplayer 10 stuff has gotten. It's actually pretty nice now.... You have to install Realplayer 10 or download the codecs to play realplayer streams on the internet seperately, though, which I find ironic.

Ubuntu also uses the Gnome 2.8 desktop and has a great setup. Since it's based on Debian and ties closely to Debian you have a hell of a lot more packages aviable then with any other operating system. So I strongly recommend that, too.

I use Apt-get in my Debian OS and my Fedora OS that I use. Apt-get is a nice package manager that helps keep track of updates and such by using online repositories (ftp sites) full of software packages. Synaptic is a nice GUI front end for it, since it's mostly a command line tool. Fedora also has the option of using Yum, but I like Apt-get mostly because I am familar with it.

Both those OS's are nice setups. I like how well Fedora was able to seutp my laptop.

Also people seem to like Mandrake a whole lot. It has a KDE based desktop (fedora offers a KDE desktop, too, but Gnome is default) and is suppose to be very user friendly and a lot of people like it.

Suse is a nice one, also....

 

[Nothinman]

LVM (large volume management)

LVM is the Logical Volume Manager.

Apt-get is a nice package manager that helps keep track of updates and such by using online repositories (ftp sites) full of software packages

APT is a wrapper around the low level package manager, for instance dpkg on Debian. There is APT for RPM too, but good luck finding a repository as large and well maintained as Debian.

 

[drag]

If I had to choose between Fedora and Debian, I'd choose debian every time.

But it's a good thing I don't have to.